Like father, like daughter

Skier Tina Weirather won a World Cup race this season. Is she related to the former world champion Harti Weirather?asked Charles McDonald

Tina Weirather, who was born in Liechtenstein in May 1989, has now won three World Cup races - two of them this season, the Super G at St Moritz and the giant slalom in Val d'Isère, in successive weeks in December. In 2012 she was second in the downhill World Cup standings.

She is indeed the daughter of Harti Weirather, the Austrian who was the downhill world champion in 1982, after winning the World Cup downhill title the previous year.

But Tina's mother is arguably an even more celebrated skier: Hanni Wenzel won the slalom and giant slalom at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, took silver in the downhill, and also won two overall World Cup titles, in 1978 and 1980. Her two Olympic golds remain the only ones the tiny grand duchy of Liechtenstein has ever won.

Tina Weirather's victory in the Super G at St Moritz came on her mother's 57th birthday.

The only other skier to follow a parent in winning a World Cup race is Germany's Felix Neureuther, who has so far won six slalom events: his father Christian also won six World Cup slaloms, while his mother, Rosi Mittermaier, was a double Olympic champion (and overall World Cup winner) in 1976. When Mittermaier won gold in the slalom at Innsbruck, Wenzel took the bronze.